journalism

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.

He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.

There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.

Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.

It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.

Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.

For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.

Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:

Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…

This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.

In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.

Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.

The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.

Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’

Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Choses Vues (Things Seen), by Victor Hugo

Two-volume Gallimard edition of Choses vues by Victor Hugo

Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.

When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:

The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.

George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.

1887 edition of Things Seen by Victor Hugo
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.

The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:

This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.

The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.

Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.

It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.

As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”

Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:

When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?

Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”

And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”

Victor Hugo, 1848.
Victor Hugo in 1848.

As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.

Illustration of the escape of Leon Gambetta from Paris by balloon, October 1870
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.

This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:

There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.

He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”

Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.

The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):

One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….

The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].

“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.

“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.

“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”

The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]

“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”

The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.

Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”

He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.

“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.

Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.

Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”

Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:

An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.

Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.

Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.

Choses vues, by Victor Hugo
Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition